Maryellen Caswell has to be the screamiest heroine I’ve ever had the misfortune to read about. I wanted to punch her before I was even halfway through this book.

Not that she doesn’t have a lot to deal with. A commercial artist in New York City, Maryellen wakes up one morning to discover that her body has been possessed by the spirit of a male alien, Sub Commander Ur Targon. Targon speaks through her lips (in a deep baritone voice) and can also control her movements and read her thoughts. So she screams. At this point, I understood. However, Maryellen is about to have lots of adventures, and her first response to all of them is to scream or yell.

Targon wants to inhabit a new body, preferably Keanu Reeves’ or Brad Pitt’s. He wants to hang out in emergency rooms and find an appropriately handsome man who is about to die so he can possess the body as soon as its owner’s soul departs. (That seemed a tad ghoulish to me. But whatever.) “I refuse to be a part of anything that would eliminate Keanu Reeves or Brad Pitt in the prime of their lives!” shrieks Maryellen. In order to shop for bodies, they go to a hospital, where Maryellen claims to be sick. When doctors come to examine Maryellen, she screams and runs away. Targon says, “I have to hand it to you. You kept your head and got out of that one all right.” I think he’s serious.

At one point Maryellen, thinking she’s gone insane, goes to see a psychiatrist, who turns out to be the evil ringleader of a group of people who believe in a government conspiracy to keep the presence of aliens away from the public. They wear Star Trek or Star Wars costumes at all times, and they want to kidnap Targon. There is also a spooky FBI agent who is tracking Targon and Maryellen for mysterious reasons of his own, and a lust-crazed secretary who is stalking the FBI agent.

If you’re getting the idea that there’s a lot going on in this book, you’d be right. Out of the Blue is so overstuffed with craziness, it’s headache-inducing. The characters, primary and secondary, are all wacky, all the time. Most of the wackiness is extreme and the jokes so heavy-handed that the only appropirate response is to roll one’s eyes. For instance, one of the “funny” things the author does is to give every secondary character a wacky name, like Dmitri Putzkobovich or Mandoleeza Hackenberry. The spooky FBI agent’s name is Wolf Madder. Maybe it’s just me, but X-Files jokes just aren’t as fresh as they used to be.

The romance? Well, Maryellen is a dingbat who screams and panics a lot. Targon, on the other hand, spends a lot of time being sneeringly contemptuous of all things Earthling. He also casually turns Maryellen’s life upside-down, ignores her, and repeatedly tells her to be quiet. This did not endear him to me in a romantic sense.

Deauxville does not succeed in creating sexual tension between Targon and Maryellen. Part of the reason is that they inhabit the same body much of the time, but even when Targon manifests as a golden hunk, he’s still obnoxious. Both characters – the shrill Maryellen and the condescending Targon – are not only unlikable but don’t seem like each other at all, until they have sex, after which they are in love. The idea of being party to any intimacies between them was not appealing. Perhaps it’s fortunate that the love scenes are quite subtle.

Humor is one of the most difficult things to write well. In my opinion, the humor in this book is extremely forced and not funny at all. Out of the Blue is the literary equivalent of being trapped with a small child who has a repertoire of puns and knock-knock jokes that he insists on telling you. It’s aggravating. And since the characters are equally aggravating and the romance is a big zero, I have no reason to recommend this book.

Oh, and one other thing: Earth’s sun is not a red dwarf. Good grief.